


For Wondrous Ends

by lyres



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Curse Breaking, Curses, Exes, Gerry's Unlikely Yet Canonical Competence, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Ghosts, Haunting, Jon's Terrible Self-Preservation Instincts, M/M, Martin Blackwood Rejects Your Curse Mechanics And Substitutes His Own
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27194410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyres/pseuds/lyres
Summary: “Give me your hand.” Gerard has traced the lines from the paper again on his own skin, down the back of his right hand, which he is extending, palm down, across the desk. “Christ, not that one.”His injured hand halfway to the desk, Jon stops. “I thought – won't it work better if it's the one she–?” It's an odd presumption. He knows nothing about thaumaturgy.“I'm sure it would. Didn't become excellent at this to have people make it easy for me, though.” Gerard moves his fingers, and there are eyes on his knuckles; there are eyes on his wrists. “Come on. I don't bite.”(In which Gerry has a ghost problem and a talent for curse-breaking, and Jon and Martin have something of a knack for getting cursed.)
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 40
Kudos: 176





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [makes the title of this a [Keats quote](http://keats-poems.com/hyperion-book-ii/) to annoy the Archivist]

There are no bookshops in Morden.

The fact of it comes to Jon unbidden as he struggles to keep himself upright on a doorstep on Abbotsbury Road. Each shaky breath he takes rattles him. There are no bookshops in Morden; those locals particularly eager to support the industry have taken to ordering books from the National Trust shop in the Stableyard. There's an Oxfam, of course, which is more rarely frequented than it deserves, but there isn't a Bookshop, capital B, with a friendly shop window and a charmingly punny name.

 _Next Chapter Books_ , reads the sign over the shop front Jon is haphazardly leaning against. His lungs burn. Did he take the tube here? Did he – Christ, he took a southbound train, didn't he; he could have been looking for Martin, if...

No, he wouldn't. Whatever drove him here, it couldn't have been enough to override his better instincts. Rain is pelting down and Jon wonders distantly if he should be cold – perhaps he is, actually, and if he found Martin, then maybe he would –

 _No_. Jon wipes a wet sleeve across his brow, trailing rainwater across fogged-up glasses in the process. Should he knock? There isn't a bookshop here, but _something_ is, someone –

His unharmed hand knocks of its own accord. Jon thinks about the shop's front window, about how he can see it, but he cannot _See_ it, about how the labels on the doorbell right next to him on the wall don't make any sense at all, and then he falls forward as the door (had he been leaning on it? He must have) opens.

Jon catches himself with both hands against the doorframe and screams, short and ragged, as his raw palm, still singing with pain, is pressed flat against the rain-slick wood.

“Woah, okay,” says a voice, and Jon has already pulled back his hand, but there are hands on his shoulders, now, keeping him on his feet, and someone is standing in front of him – strong hands, thinks Jon, and long hair (poorly dyed), and grey eyes lined with black, and an expression of absolute bewilderment.

Jon stares. His own voice, hoarse and shaken, is alien to him. “Gerard Keay?”

“What the fuck,” says the person who may or may not be Gerard, and Jon's legs give out as his vision goes dark.

Someone must have rearranged Jon while he was out, plucked away limbs and organs and put them back right. Being able to take stock of himself – what's there, what isn't, what he can feel, what he can't, what he can see – is oddly surprising. So is being able to place, somewhat exactly, where it hurts: his hand, as if it were still on fire; his legs – no – his right knee, worse than it usually does. His lungs, as if they're sore from the effort of heaving up smoke.

His eyes, beneath the lids.

Jon blinks. After a few attempts, the blurry shapes around him arrange themselves into bookshelves and boxes packed to bursting, into loose books stacked haphazardly up in rows that nearly reach the ceiling, and into the person who might be Gerard Keay sitting cross-legged on the carpet, tapping about on his phone as if this has barely disturbed his daily routine.

He looks up with mild interest. “Feeling better there, Lazarus?”

It strikes Jon that he was most definitely staring, but any attempt at apology – or worse, justification – gets stuck in his throat the moment he opens his mouth and a hacking cough rocks his shoulders. He curls in on himself and is instantly assaulted in another sense, the odd smell of old leather suddenly wildly prominent.

“Oh, shit. Hang on.”

Footsteps; the distant sound of a tap being turned on. His eyes still sting with tears of exhaustion, so Jon pats around with his good hand, feeling – coarse wool, and cracked leather cushions, and... Good God, this man must have carried him to a sofa.

The vague sound that escapes him when his host returns with a glass of water which Jon feebly accepts does justice neither to his mortification nor his gratitude.

“Out of tea, I'm afraid.” Perhaps-Gerard drops down on the floor unceremoniously. “I don't tend to get a lot of visitors.”

The first word out of Jon's mouth, hoarse and wretched, is “Sorry.” Then, rather delayed, as he thinks he can hear his grandmother chide him from beyond the grave, “Thank you.”

“I've not done anything for you,” observes the person who might be Gerard Keay. “Unless you're here for a nap on my couch, in which case, y'know.” He gestures. “You're welcome.”

He should have noticed it earlier, Jon's brain is kind to remind him, but he only sees it now that he feels taxed by it: an eye, neatly tattooed on maybe-Gerard's neck, front and centre. Jon stares at it a beat too long; a chill goes through him. Even when his pain-blurred vision swims, the eye remains clear.

“I'm sorry, I –” He stops. Potentially-Gerard is watching him, the look in his eyes carefully neutral, a little bit curious. “Gerard Keay?”

“If you must,” says confirmed-Gerard mildly. He leans back. “And you are? Aside from spectacularly fucked.”

It startles an odd, choked laugh out of Jon that does not remain a laugh for long. He coughs, and touches his chest, and remembers in that same moment the scorched skin on his hand. The sting makes him bend forward in pain. _Spectacularly fucked, indeed_. “Jonathan Sims,” he says, and bites his tongue. “I'm with the Magnus Institute.”

He recognizes it as the wrong thing to have said in an instant. Something shutters behind Gerard's eyes; a small crease appears between pierced eyebrows. “Epistemology, huh. Figures.”

“I – well, I'm not –” Helplessly, Jon drifts off. “Sorry, figures how?”

“No one's found my shop in years.” Gerard's smile is thin. “Not by looking for Gerard Keay, anyway. You one of Elias's, then?”

Nausea is added instantly to the cocktail of awful sensations Jon has only just compiled into a neat list. He closes his eyes, forces in one breath, two, three, and manages by a hair not to drop back into that rattling cough. “Formerly so,” he says, “you could say.”

Gerry's eyes don't soften. They prod. The tattoo on his neck does not move, but it focuses, thinks Jon; it pins him unrelentingly, perfectly prepared to find him wanting.

Jon, bone-tired and raw with pain, lets it happen. The question of how an attempt at measuring up to Gerard Keay would go for him needs no scrying to have an obvious answer.

“Right.” Gerard leans forward, hands clasping like he's made up his mind. “What do you want, Jonathan Sims? You'll get it in return for telling me how you found this place.” His frown is thoughtful, more curious than angry. “I've been working pretty hard on that disguise. If you slipped past it, worse things could. Especially those with Institute affiliations, I reckon.”

“Have you – are –” Jon falters. Gerard Keay has been featuring in his research for so long that seeing him caught off guard by something seems utterly alien. “Sorry, I had the impression that you weren't – really keeping up with, with that part of London. Not anymore, at least.”

“What, Chelsea? Yeah, not really my scene.” Jon's huff of exasperation earns him another crooked smile. “No, I know what you mean. I kept out of it for a while, trying to leave some things behind. But it's hard not to keep an eye out. And you never really can get out, can you.”

Jon isn't sure you can't get out. He knows Gerard Keay _hasn't_. It would have been so easy to assume he'd died, otherwise; that he'd met with the same fate as his mother once he'd been able to walk free again. But even after her death and his eventual release, he just... kept showing up. Almost reluctantly, as far as Jon was able to tell from his research, and only where a gifted thaumaturge was sorely needed. He moved like a ghost, appearing in places seemingly at random, with no one having managed to pin him down in years. Pinhole Books, rumour had it, had long been sold, its former markedly grim shop front looking like yet another Waterstones these days.

Jon also knows it's stupid to prod, and he knows what Georgie would say. _Leave it to an epistemologist to dig their own grave for the sake of the fewest, smallest crumbs_. “What happened?”

The grin becomes wry. Gerard Keay, Jon remembers slightly too late, has every reason to distrust him. “See if you can figure it out,” says Gerard. “You show me yours...”

Jon finishes his water and tries not to glance at the tattoos too obviously as Gerard moves about the room. They are far, far more than one, just as the little testimonials and snippets at the Institute had promised. It's unsettling, and somehow, thinks Jon, only fair. People don't like epistemologists. If someone wants to give them a taste of their own medicine, he hardly has the right to complain.

Unnervingly comfortable in the midst of the bookshop's perfect chaos, Gerard has managed to free up some desk space in the corner of the room that looks more like an unhinged artist's studio than anything else. Loose sheets of watercolour paper slide off the desk, and Jon catches a blur of drawings in black paint on them, haphazard and swirled, with symbols he's never seen before marking the backs of the sheets. He doesn't want to admit the effort it takes not to reach out for one.

“Here,” Gerard motions vaguely for Jon to follow him to where he's sat down outrageously (legs apart, one ankle kicked over the other leg's knee; who _sits_ like that?) at one side of the desk. He gives a grim smile. “Won't hurt a bit.”

“Right.” Jon doesn't wince as he stands up, and he does not shiver as he takes a seat opposite from Gerard, because somewhere along the line, his panic and pain have given in to nothing at all. Gerard will do his worst, and it will hurt, presumably, and Jon can't remember the last time that kind of thing made a difference to him.

“A curse, do you think?” Gerard Keay is watching him with one eye, entirely focused on his papers with the others.

“I – yes.” Butterfly pinned under glass; squirming will do no good. It helps Jon remember, though, gives him little choice. He remembers his way here and the absolute clusterfuck of an afternoon, of a _week_ he's had. “I think so. I heard her say the words, only I can't – I don't remember –”

“Yeah, they never do.” The smile is still there, softer now. “Can't have you run on to the next best thaumaturge and recite it, can she. We'd know how to break it, then. No, that's not their style.”

“There's no next best thaumaturge,” blurts out Jon. Gerard looks up, now, both eyes on him as the tattoo on his neck narrows with focus. “I – I mean, there's only you. You're the only one anyone's ever heard of. Do you – are there others?”

“Dunno.” Gerard shrugs easily, disaffected again. “I know my mum never trained anyone else. And since she was _so_ proud of being self-taught...” He shakes his head. “She loved her little bootstraps story. Of course others exist, just not here. London magicians climb their little ladders to the moon and think they've seen it all; meanwhile, people could be building rocketships a continent over and people here'd be none the wiser. That's English magic for you. It's insular; it's reductive. Grossly smug, too. Not really what you want to hear, though, is it?”

Jon has no response. He does want to hear it. One of these days, his head is going to burst with how much he wants to hear it all, and he won't –

He stops.

Something is here. He Sees it before it shows itself; it flashes up violently in his mind, something practically screaming with the need to be seen. The force of it makes his stomach drop.

Gerard, still occupied with digging through the clutter on the desk between them, is perfectly undisturbed, and Jon can't say anything, his eyes drawn suddenly to the only window in the room. It's shuttered, letting in only little light, but what made him look was a quick, dark movement just before the glass, easy to be missed if it hadn't announced himself so bloody loudly before. It becomes more than a movement, then, a spot of greyscale that spreads like too-fast growing mold before the window, and Jon feels suddenly dizzy. “There's–”

“Try not to pay any attention,” says Gerard across from him. He's fished out a clean sheet of paper, is dipping a paintbrush in a drop of black acrylic paint, and looks fairly bored – certainly not alarmed. “Just encourages her. It'll be over in a second.”

Jon scrambles to listen, forcing his gaze at the desk in front of him, but it's impossible to miss even out of the corner of his eye: the slow, tortured suggestion of darkness by the window, now accompanied with a distorted, irregular groaning sound, like the creaking of an old barn door. Gerard catches Jon's gaze, and shakes his head with a quick roll of his eyes.

Knuckles turning white where he's grabbed on to the surface of the desk with his good hand, Jon pushes down the instinct to look. He forces himself to breathe, but the room feels smaller, all of a sudden, and only half as warm as it had felt just a moment ago. “This – this is normal?”

“Painfully normal. Just don't give in to it,” says Gerard and directs his attention back to his drawing as the groaning grows louder. For a moment, Jon thinks it approaches something almost human – no – no, it can't be human, that echoing, pained and laboured moan, just as the spot of desaturation by the window attempts to whirl itself into a shape –

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

Jon blinks, helplessly lost. As quickly as it came, the shadow has vanished; the noise has quieted down. Dust is catching in the slants of light that fall in through the shutters. “You get used to it after a while. Just haven't had company in a bit, or I'd have thought to warn you.” Gerard shrugs, barely apologetic. “What can you do? Anyway, ready?”

“I – know some people,” says Jon, somewhat without his own permission. The fright sits in his bones, still. He catches himself in the half-lie. “Or, well, one person. If you, uh, if you'd like to get rid of – that? Or just have someone look into it? I could give you her details.”

“Nice of you.” Gerard is looking at him now, one eyebrow raised, looking slightly bemused. “Medium?”

“Necromancer.” Jon doesn't quite know where to look. “She's really very good.”

The words taste strange. He can picture how it would be if she'd heard him say them maybe a year ago, snorting, saying something along the lines of “Wonders never fucking cease, do they”. The thought makes him ache in a place he'd almost forgotten.

“Remind me to take her address later,” says Gerard, not meaning it. He never stopped working on the drawing on the desk between them: his paintbrush moves too quickly for Jon to make sense of; the resulting pattern he's never seen before. “Who was it?”

Gerard is looking at him, again, and nods vaguely towards Jon's hand. The question stills Jon for a moment. Then, rather unexpectedly, it startles a laugh out of him – at his own idiocy, maybe, at the irony of it all, at the mess he's made. “Jude Perry.”

“Ugh.” Gerard grimaces. “Guess at least I know what to look for, then.”

Jon wants to ask what it is he'll look for, what Gerard could possibly draw out of him that Jon can't See himself. He wants to know if the outline of Jude Perry's hand is more than just burnt skin, if she's left a magical mark beneath, identifiable like a fingerprint. He wants to know what Gerard will try to read in him, if the parameters of a curse are written in words or ether or –

“Give me your hand.” Gerard has added a symbol to his drawing, and he has traced the lines from the paper again on his own skin, down the back of his right hand, which he is extending, palm down, across the desk. “Christ, not that one.”

His injured hand halfway to the desk, Jon stops. “I thought – won't it work better if it's the one she–?” It's an odd presumption. He knows nothing about thaumaturgy.

“I'm sure it would. Didn't become excellent at this to have people make it easy for me, though.” Gerard moves his fingers, and there are eyes on his knuckles; there are eyes on his wrists. “Come on. I don't bite.”

Gerard Keay, to Jon's knowledge, doesn't harm anyone unless pressed. The too-young memory of the last time someone touched his hand is searing in every sense of the word.

Slowly, Jon extends his hand and places it, palm up, on the paper as Gerard directs him. Gerard rests his hand lightly on Jon's, allowing their palms to line up and for Gerard's fingertips to brush across Jon's wrist. “All right,” he says, and taxes Jon with an unnervingly direct gaze. “All you need to do is hold still and not freak out.”

“I think I can manage that,” says Jon thinly, and he watches Gerard Keay's fingers move on his skin until his middle finger is lined up with a rather prominent vein.

“Good,” says Gerard Keay, and beneath his touch, Jon's vein lights up.

The instinct to flinch away is avoided, if narrowly. Jon's breath only caught for a moment.

“Well done,” says Gerard, slightly sardonic, and his eyes follow the warm light in Jon's arm as it creeps steadily up his vein and disappears under his sleeve. “It's fine to get anxious, by the way. A quicker heartbeat's gonna help this along.”

“Fantastic news,” says Jon dryly – because he's not afraid, really; he feels no pain, no burn at all as the light shows dimly beneath his dress shirt. He does not feel afraid – he feels, somehow, immensely relieved. “Is – are you scrying?”

Gerard's focus does not break, even while he cracks a smile. “I'm working a miracle, Jonathan. In the job description, isn't it?”

“Jon,” says Jon, and tries to ignore the way a line of soft light crawls towards his heart. Gerard's eyes are on it, still. “I mean, is it – am I a living method of divination right now, or how –”

“No, _Jon_ , it's transmutation. Not even a difficult type. People get so weird about thaumaturgy, especially you lot, but it's just... sort of a pick and mix deal. Offensive by the Institute's standards, obviously. Unclean, unnatural, blah blah blah.” Gerard's gaze has followed the light as it moved by Jon's heart and up to his shoulder, then down his other arm. “This could sting a bit,” he says as the light travels surely towards Jon's burned hand, and Jon braces himself in some careful sort of indifference, and then –

Gerard's eyes slip shut. His brow pinches, as if he's looking for something, and his grip on Jon's wrist tightens.

“Gerard?”

“It's Gerry.” Through clenched teeth, “Shut up.”

Right. Shutting up. That's easy. A simple thing; only Gerry has a death grip on Jon's wrist, and the light on Jon's arm spreads out further and finer and through his smallest blood vessels, and Gerry's breath is becoming strained, and it's more than a little terrifying.

“Show yourself, you bloody...” murmurs Gerry, but the attempt at aggression falls flat with how laboured he sounds. Jon wants to ask him how to help, what to do – no, he wants to ask him what he is _doing_ , what kind of transmutation could possibly make his blood light up –

Gerry opens his eyes. Within seconds, the yellow light vanishes, bolting up Jon's arm, crossing his chest, finally fizzling out around the grip of Gerry's hand. He's breathing heavily, and Jon can see a sheen of sweat on his brow, glistening palely in the dim light. When he raises his eyes, the look in them startles Jon. Fear, even with how briefly they've known each other, looks painfully misplaced in Gerard Keay's features.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Jon stares. “Did –”

“No, what happened? Tell me exactly. Else I've no idea what to do with this.”

“Did you see something? What –”

“I didn't see Jude Perry's curse, if that's what's worrying you,” says Gerry. His voice is still rough. “She tried, and tried hard, from the looks of it. It just – it didn't take.”

Jon's confusion must be evident in his expression, and is rewarded by Gerry with a sharp sigh.

“Think of a curse as a – viral infection. When someone curses you, all they're doing, really, is infect you with just enough of their own magic to cause a riot. It has to latch on; it has to really _live_ in you for any curse to take effect. But it didn't manage. Jude Perry should have gotten you – I saw her attempt; she really didn't pull any punches. The mark's right there. But in your bloodstream, in you, there's just no trace of it.”

Is that good news? Jon can't quite follow. He hears “didn't take”, and simply blanks. “So I'm... not cursed, then.”

“You're not cursed by Jude Perry. I wouldn't get too excited, though.” It only occurs to Jon now, now that he isn't doing it, that Gerry smiles more than he expected. Not happily, most of the time, but a smile, wry and ironic as it was, looked more natural on his features than this relentless urgency. “It should have worked. It didn't, and if you can't tell me why, all you have is a bigger problem than before. Best I can guess, she couldn't do it because someone else got there first.”

Of course someone did. It'd have been laughable, wouldn't it, for Jon to hope for anything else. He can barely register it fully. Jude Perry burned his hand, but she didn't curse him; she tried to, and something stopped her. This much tracks – the rest, he's too tired to think about or try to see.

“Right,” he says quietly. Was he expecting a useful answer, anyway? Was that really what drove him here, straight from being injured by yet another person he managed to antagonize, or was it a desperate and selfish search for an ally in all this, a search he should have known from the start was fruitless?

Jon looks down at his arm. His skin is lighter where Gerry's fingers have left imprints, but the light in his veins has faded completely. Gerard Keay has done his job. At least Jon can return that favour. “What was it you wanted to know from me?”

“Everything, now,” says Gerry shortly. “Price just went up. How you found me, why the fuck you tried, what you did to piss off Jude Perry, everything.”

Against his better judgement, Jon laughs, even though it comes out quiet and pitiful. If he had answers to at least some of those questions, his life might look somewhat tidier even to himself. “Where do you want me to start?”

Gerry sits up straighter, leaning forward in his seat, and once more, Jon feels the gaze of that single ever-open eye on him, intenser now than it was before. “Why don't you work for Elias anymore?”

It's almost enough to make him laugh again. That, at least, Jon has a firm response to. “Because no one does,” he says, mostly numb. The pain in his hand remains, dull and faded. “I'd hope so, at least. Elias Bouchard was killed a week ago.”

The silence lasts a beat too long.

“All right,” says Gerry at the end of it, and stands up from the desk. He looks down at Jon. For the first time since he stumbled inside the store, Jon doesn't feel pinned by that gaze. “That'll be the type of story I need a cigarette for.”

Jon exhales. What's there to lose? He's done worse things. More stupid things, certainly. Hell, he's done more stupid things _today_. Might as well spill his guts to the one person with no skin in the game whatsoever – at least if this ends up drawing him in as well, Jon will be able to tell himself that he asked for it. “Me too,” he mutters.

The guilt will catch up with him later, he's sure. But not just yet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Writing for a new fandom makes me intensely nervous and I'm likely to love you forever if you stick around. Please come talk to me [on tumblr](https://lesamis.tumblr.com/).  
> A note on tags: I've tagged the characters that are likely to have POV parts in this fic, and tagged the relationships the story explicitly focuses on. Other relationships & characters will feature; just drop me a note if you'd prefer to know which ones in advance :')  
> Next up: Gerry & Melanie hunt a ghost and we check in on Martin.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for: accidental burns & discussion of a past suicide (for reference: Mary Keay's canonical death).

It's something of a silly cliché, Martin thinks, that two people would have to somehow agree between them who would get “the friends” after a break–up. How is that decided? Why can't friends stay friends? In any case, there's definitely no established protocol in place for when two people who break up somehow manage to both end up without friends. That sort of perfidy is reserved for the Magnus Institute.

What _has_ he kept, really? Not his workplace, not his friends, not – not Jon.

 _The trauma_ , his mind supplies helpfully. _That's there to stay_.

Martin rolls his eyes at himself before leaving his flat, determined to shut those thoughts in with the door.

In some ways, he's better off now. Forging references that testify to previous experience in retail is a lot easier than faking a background in research and epistemology, and the past few years of muddling through at the Institute have given him just about enough confidence to lie his way into a low–level managerial role. He's good at it, too; not that that counts for much. He understands tea and he understands people. (He does not entirely understand supply chains yet. He's working on it.) His coworkers – students, mostly, and some unfortunate graduates – like him, and he likes them. Sometimes, the delivery driver who brings in new stock will speak Polish with him, a strange familiarity in a place that Martin still hasn't managed to make his home these past few months. There's really not much more he can ask for.

Of course, he thinks as he squeezes his way past the line of people standing on the escalator, his workplace could be a little easier to get to. The shop is even further south than his flat, and the tube is a bit of a nightmare in the morning, but that's nothing he's not used to. A sad and quiet part of him finds it comforting, even, how the crowded trains go the smallest way to counteract that particular loneliness of the city. There's comfort in the routine of it, too, in the recognition of some of the same faces, the same people returning like migratory birds to the same platform each morning at 7:30, hurrying through the same tunnels and turning the same corners –

“Oh!”

Martin feels the collision before he really sees it; bits of change clatter around him and the man who turned a corner slightly too enthusiastically and walked right into him is already crouching before Martin with a quiet curse, moving quickly to pick up the coins.

“So sorry, here, let me help –”

And now they're both being an obstacle, huddled in the middle of the walkway to the platform, desperately saving coins from passers-by and mumbling apologies.

“I think that's all of them, sorry again –”

“Nah, not your fault, here –” The man holds out the coin purse with a muttered “Cheers” as Martin drops the change in, and then, in an instant, just as their fingers brush, draws back his hand with a violent curse.

Martin flinches. “Sorry, are –”

“Bloody – ah, hell.” The man stumbles backwards, holding onto one hand with the other, and for only a second, Martin can spot it, can see the harsh red of his skin like a sudden sunburn on the man's fingers. Their eyes meet, and Martin isn't sure which one of them must look more startled.

“Sorry, was that – static, or –”

The man stares, frozen to the spot for a moment, eyes wide and fixed on Martin. Then, with a glance towards his folded hand and a quick look back up, he turns and hurries back towards the escalators.

The shop sits in crisp morning light when Martin arrives, its door painted a cheerful light blue that is just a little too garish for him to find any joy in this time of day. Martin decides to find some in it anyway. It's an artistic sort of neighbourhood – lots of students – and the shop fits right in. If things were different, Martin thinks it might feel homey, in time. By now, even the scent of it is familiar, and he's loved that scent ever since he was young, the smell of a tea shop that keeps its loose leaf stocks right there behind the counter. The smell of a tea shop where the plants on the windowsills have names.

It occurs to Martin, just as the bell at the front jingles, that a decade ago, he'd have considered a job in a place like this an almost comical stroke of luck.

“Morning!” Evie's got the morning shift, which is great, because she's cheerful and dependable and Martin is sure there's a version of him that would look forward to these mornings where he gets to withdraw quietly to the office and trust her to keep things running until people start dropping in on their lunch breaks. It falls flat, though, and always has. Some days he can see through it more clearly than on others, but that veil between him and the people around him hasn't lifted in months.

“Morning.” He makes an effort to smile. “You look chipper.”

“You _really_ don't.” She drops her bag on the chair behind the counter and frowns at him. “Everything all right?”

“Just a little tired. Week-end's never long enough, is it.”

Evie rolls her eyes. “I couldn't wait for it to end, actually. My little sister was visiting; God, I can't even keep up with her anymore. I never feel older than when she's around, you know? As if she's –”

They're interrupted by the front bell, which Martin decides to take as his cue to hide away in the back and tackle those order forms he's been putting off.

A good amount of his time on the job is spent self-teaching: furiously googling import law and accounting skills and VBA and whatever curveball he's thrown that day. So far, the mistakes he did make out of sheer ignorance were small enough to be covered up quickly, but he lives in an odd state between paranoia and static. Everything worries him, and nothing does. His first few weeks at the Institute were like that, so it's not unfamiliar – but it's hardly welcome, either. It takes Martin two and a half hours this morning to let his head drop into his hands and fight to urge to scream.

“Knock-knock.” Evie has opened the door before Martin can properly attempt to look like he's not on the brink of a panic attack, but she doesn't seem to notice. “Lady had me make this, then suddenly wanted the Assam instead.” She holds up a paper cup, the lid still securely on. “Wasn't Spice Imperial your favourite?”

He squints at her. “Maybe. Are you bribing me?”

“I'm being sustainable and not throwing this drink out,” she corrects, and holds it out for him. “You know I'm an herbal infusion kind of girl. A traitor to the nation.”

“Right,” he remembers and reaches out for the cup, “lemon and ginger.” Because yeah, they _did_ have that conversation, didn't they, only he forgot immediately after or was barely present during, or –

Evie shouts, short and high pitched, and they both, at the same time, pull back their hands from where they'd met across the desk. Heart hammering, Martin is pushed violently back into the present, and in the present, Evie is flexing her hand that's just let go of the cup she was holding, and she's startled, her eyes glassy with the sting of pain.

Martin stares, horror spreading as a cold pool at the bottom of his stomach. On the desk between them, a trickle of spilled tea runs, still steaming, towards his sleeve.

It's a horrible idea to call Tim. It's stupid and pointless and goes against everything Martin had oh-so-carefully stacked up as the foundation of this fledgling new beginning (there's a system to it, see; he can't be heartbroken over Jon or his friends when he's erased every trace of their presence in his life).

The thing is, Tim was a stray elemental magician in the Institute who'd first tripped over magic, then chased it relentlessly in his search for answers. The thing is, Tim didn't hate Martin even in the end, when he was so hell-bent on making himself hate Jon – and before, Tim was the sort of friend who would always, come hell or high water, pick up the phone.

(The thing is, really, Martin has no one else. He's alone, and after he manages to half-heartedly jump on Evie's explanation of how the steamer makes for weird temperature jumps in the drinks sometimes, he's frightened with the same kind of buzzing sense of _wrong_ that followed him around in the Institute, the kind that it's taken him months to shake after he quit.)

There is a cautious kind of evenness in Tim's voice when he answers the phone, but answer it he does, and fifteen minutes after the shop closes that night, Tim is at the door, hair in that same artful tousle Sasha used to poke fun at and holding a blatant and slightly provocative paper cup of coffee.

“Hi,” says Martin, arms stiff at his sides.

“Hi?” Tim raises an eyebrow, steps inside, has a look around the shop. “Look how you've moved up in the world. I could shop here once a year for mum's Christmas present, tops.”

“We've advent calendars, too, if – if she's interested. Ha.”

“Tell you what, you can give me one on the house in return for having me come down to wherever this is. Really, a pub or something wouldn't have done?”

Level ground for them, finally. Something sparks in Martin's chest, almost strange now, that semblance of warmth. “Well, maybe I thought it'd do you good to see a different side of the city, hm? Mr Bloomsbury? Also I, uh, I think it might not be entirely safe for me to be on a train right now.”

Tim, previously engaged in rummaging about their gift-wrap drawer behind the counter, stops in his tracks. He looks up. “Say again?”

Martin cringes, then submits. Easier to get it over with. “Sorry,” he says, fully expecting for Tim to snap, but nothing comes. “We'd better talk in the office.”

It shouldn't be difficult to explain, but Martin, ten minutes later and with his hands worrying nervously against his desk, still struggles. “Do people ever –” His third attempt, and he stops again. This is stupid. He _knows_ it doesn't happen. He may not be particularly talented where magic is concerned, but he did work with it for years. “I think I'm using elemental magic. I don't want to! I just – it just happens, like, like I'm a stove someone forgot they turned on, or something.”

“Hang on.” Leaning forward, Tim looks decidedly too excited for this situation. “You learned pyrokinetics?”

“No! I mean, not intentionally – and I can't even be sure, really, but I must have? I, I've – sort of burned people? On accident? It happened when they touched me, as if – Tim!”

Without warning and lightning–quick, Tim has reached out to touch his index finger once, too decidedly, against the tip of Martin's nose. His “Oh, _fuck_ ” is swallowed up by Martin's “Why would you _do_ that”, and still faster than he reached out, Tim pulls back his hand and flexes it, his fingertip suddenly a hot pink. “Wow, that really hurts. Phew.”

“Don't do that again! I told you –” Martin pushes back his chair, looking around the office hectically as if in search of a fire extinguisher. “Christ, we need to find you an ice pack or something –”

“No, no–no–no–no–no.” Tim shakes his head, already grinning again. “We are not going anywhere. Martin, do you realise what this means?”

“Don't you dare make a joke.”

So Tim keeps quiet about, presumably, Martin's finally–literal hotness and says instead, “You're a hazard now, Martin. You could do whatever the hell you like. Who's going to stop you? You could walk into the Institute's head office and tenderly stroke Elias's face. Accidents happen, right? Oh!” He brightens. “You could singe Jon's eyebrows clean off. Talk about effective revenge.”

Martin isn't sure why it stings. It shouldn't. He knows exactly where Tim stands; if he didn't, perhaps they'd have met up at some point in the past few months. “Please leave him out of this.”

“Oh, you're joking.” It worries Martin, and has for a while, how quickly the humour can drop out of Tim's voice. “ _Leave_ him out of it? Do you honestly think there's a version of events where he doesn't have anything to do with this?”

“How would he even come into it? I've not seen him in months, he doesn't – look, could we just leave it?”

“I really don't know why you defend him.”

“Tim, you don't –”

Martin stops. He takes a breath. He doesn't want to be angry at Tim, and really, they don't deserve to be torn apart by this bloody mess. Martin remembers the conversations, if they can be called that, they tried to have about it before: how Tim had said, the last time they'd seen each other, slightly drunk and utterly maudlin, “I don't see how I'm the one saying this; he didn't break _my_ heart,” and how it had occurred to Martin then that maybe that wasn't quite true.

It's a fine line to walk. “You got what you wanted from the Institute; you clearly don't want anything to do with Jon anymore, and – well, neither do I, so let's maybe just not bring it up? Last I checked, Jon wasn't the one accidentally scorching people on the tube.”

“Right,” says Tim after a moment. He looks unhappy, and yeah, that just about figures, doesn't it. “Sorry. I think I just can't get how you're so – so Zen about it.”

Martin wants to keep on track. He wants to; he wants to drop the topic and not think about Jon and only think about whatever the hell is happening to him now, but then...

He could _really_ use a friend again. The need is overwhelming and stark and a little bit pathetic.

“I tried to find something at first, you know?” His eyes go anywhere but to meet Tim's. “A – a reason. You know, anything at all, any sign that he was in danger, maybe, or that – that something was wrong with the Institute. Aside from, well, from the obvious. I know what you think about him now, but he's not – he wouldn't –” He hates this. There's no way of making Tim of all people understand it the way it needs to be understood. “It wasn't like him, what he did. What he said.”

It wasn't. Martin knew – Martin _knows_ Jon, and the Jon he knows used to be a bit of a prick because he was haughty and scared, not because he was cruel. Martin was too taken aback to see it at first, too surprised and too hurt, but once the shock wore off, nothing about it fit together.

“I really looked, any way I knew how. I talked to people, I followed up with everyone who might know something, it got – really shady at times, too, but I only turned up dead ends. And they were all ridiculous, anyway, as if someone was deliberately misleading me. I'd feel so close to really getting somewhere, and then an address would be off by a digit or someone conveniently moved continents, it was – like a wall suddenly went up the moment I was on to something.”

He glances at Tim, whose expression has become indecipherable. It's not a good look on him, although really, everything should be a good look on Tim – it's just that he's an open book, usually. Being closed off doesn't come naturally to him. “I really hated it,” says Martin quietly. “Until I just… didn't, anymore. Easier to let it be. Maybe it really was me, you know? I'd understand that, too.”

Tim's expression has changed into a frown. A few seconds of silence, and he rolls his eyes. “Oh, that's bullshit.”

 _Christ_. “Tim –”

“No, I don't mean – here, it doesn't even matter whether Jon wanted to push us out of the Institute to go on some kind of solo suicide mission, or because that's just the kind of bastard he is. Either way, it wasn't you. Yeah?” Tim shrugs, like it's easy. Like he wants it to be. “You deserve better than this. He wants to let go of something good, I say we let him.”

And just like that, they're in the same place they always end up. It's kindly meant, Martin knows it is. But even though Tim has known him longer, there are things he doesn't know about Jon that Martin _does_ know and that he cannot, not after getting his heart broken, not five months into a new life, make himself forget.

The way Jon responds to gentleness, surprised and unsure, but always pleased, like he's simply lost the knack of touching.

The clothes he sleeps in: Flannels and old t-shirts with faded university logos or band names, whatever he's had the longest that'll be soft with wear. How much he likes soft things without really noticing it, so if he randomly reaches for the wrong sweater, it'll bother him the whole night, even if he doesn't give the discomfort enough space to acknowledge it.

That he can cook, and is something of a snob about food.

And his magic, as well, the gentle focus of it, the odd and off ways in which he's prepared to use it. One of the first times they'd gone out together was for their lunch break to a museum a short walk from the Institute. Off-hand, Martin had asked some question or other about the engraving on a Blake, and Jon had put his palm flat to the print and scried from it to find out. They're still both banned from the Tate.

(The ways in which he won't use it, too. The things he refuses to See. Those almost matter more.)

The point is, Martin isn’t wrong about any of these things. They’re Jon, just as hiding away like an injured cat is Jon, and as choosing the worst of misunderstandings over talking about his emotions is Jon.

In these small little gaps, the rips in his numbness, Martin misses him like a home.

They all have their weak points. “Have you heard anything from Sasha?”

Tim's smile is quick and joyless. “Yeah, she's at that – you know the place off Cromwell Road? Psychic Studies, right across from the museums?”

“Oh, on Queensberry Place?” Martin frowns. “I thought they were hacks.”

Tim scoffs. “Come on. No more than the 'Dusty Victorian Rat Who Made Up A Fancy Name For Mind-Magic To Feel Superior'-Institute. And she never bought into that, anyway.”

“Mh.” It makes sense, really. Elias cared more about scrying than anything else, and while Sasha was arguably better at that to begin with than the rest of them, she's first and foremost an illusionist. Still magic of the mind, sure, and just enough to fall under Elias's rather snobbish umbrella of epistemology, but not enough to get her Jon's promotion, no matter how much she deserved it. “She's been in touch, then?”

“Nah, not really. I don't blame her. She's better off away from this, isn't she.”

Tim truly wants to believe that when he says it. Martin can tell how much. “Are you?” Martin asks. “Better off, I mean. Away from it all.”

Instead of responding, Tim makes a face, and looks about the room. He finds what he's looking for – a mug of now-cold tea abandoned on the edge of the desk, and that pinches Martin somewhere as well, that Tim would still know exactly that he'd find one here – and he wraps a hand around it, the other one dipping in to draw out a swirl of tea in a small, amber-coloured spiral.

“It's hard to let go of, isn't it,” says Martin quietly.

Tim moves his hand downwards, and the tea runs itself down into the mug in a gentle pour. Steam rises from the mug again; the soft sound of simmering water comes and goes in a gentle swell. “I don't really want anything to do with it,” says Tim, and pushes the tea towards Martin.

He takes it. It's at a perfect temperature, just below the point where it'd burn his tongue. “Look, what am I supposed to do?” (Because Tim didn't say those words and then get up and leave; because Tim didn't say no to Martin's question.) “I can't even get in to work without hurting someone by accident.”

“Martin,” says Tim, and there it is again, finally, that spark in the eye that is uniquely Tim's, that small thing, easily missed, that makes people feel at ease around him, “I'm a man of taste, so you know this pains me to say. But,” he grins, earnest now, “in the interest of public safety, it might be time for you to show a little less skin.”

In spite of it all, Martin bites his lip to stop a smile.

Just by a little bit, the veil lifts.

* * *

In the end, Gerry calls her out of curiosity. Jon had been strange, unhelpful, interesting, and an utter wreck from start to finish, but what almost managed to capture Gerry's attention more than the encyclopedia of supernatural trivia he let out between garbled coughs was the way he talked about _people_.

He left Melanie King's number with Gerry, scrawled messily, but not without practice with his left hand, although he'd reached for everything so instinctively with his right before remembering the injury. He said, in that hoarse, soft voice of his, “Best not to mention my name, if you decide to call.” It lacked any and all inflection. He said, left hand braced against Gerry's doorway on his way out, “Thank you for everything, I – I'll be fine.”

Jonathan Sims couldn't be further from fine. Even without all he told Gerry, it would have been obvious that he was at the end of his rope, his fraying magic and haggard frame bearing testament to a hellish past few months in a way his brittle, if cohesive narration of events couldn't.

And what a narration it was. Gerry stopped him here and there to ask him to elaborate on a detail or repeat a name, but other than that, he was remarkably coherent, as if he was reading off a script, or playing a recording. It only occurred to Gerry that that was probably what Jon was doing: epistemologists work that way, don't they, treating their minds as carefully curated libraries from which information is to be recalled rather than reproduced. Gerry's always found that inhibiting, but then, he didn't have to try to fit into any frame but his mother's, while Jon's training seems to have tied him to the Institute – to Elias, really – like a particularly malevolent kind of tether. His education would have been regimented, Oxford to Magnus, and Gerry figures that there's no reason Jon would have expected anything less restrictive than what he found, but the thought still makes him feel uneasy. It's no wonder someone so used to restraints would notice too late that a noose was tightening around his neck.

Worse, then, that he still doesn't know what the noose is, only that the person who was holding it is now dead. Jon said he'd started to understand some time earlier this year that Elias was planning something, and listening to the steps he took in response was enough to make Gerry wince in response even remembering it. “The strange thing is that hardly anything's changed,” Jon said towards the end of his little narration. “I don't feel any less trapped. I don't think anything's... been dislodged, really. Sometimes I wonder if he somehow managed to make his own murder a part of his plan. Enough people were certainly after him for him to count on it.”

“And now they're after you,” Gerry pointed out, needlessly. It was an old acquaintance of Elias's that had led Jon to come running to his bookshop, after all. The corner of Jon's mouth turned up in response.

“Yes, I suppose so. What a disappointment it'll be for the next one who finds me.”

Elias was killed in his office, is what Jon was told. Jon, one of the few staff members still permitted in the Institute while the Lucas family does their best to hush up the murder, attempted to scry in it, and found nothing. No one's died there, he said. Not recently.

No use in asking to be involved, then. Gerry's not going to let it go, of course. Even beyond everything Jon told him, which would in itself be enough to jump-start Gerry's own investigations, it's humiliating to be as useless as Gerry had to be when asked to identify Jon's curse. He doesn't like being out of his depth, but there's little point in asking Jon for more than he's already given. No, Gerry's best bet is another angle altogether. His best bet, he reminds himself as he waits for her in front of the shop not a full week after Jon's stumbled into his life with all the grace of a dead man walking, is Melanie King.

She arrives five minutes late and carrying a backpack that's roughly the size of her torso. When she spots Gerry, her eyes narrow, darting quickly back and forth between him and the shop's entrance. “Honestly,” she says in lieu of a greeting, “I thought it'd look more haunted.”

“Sorry to disappoint. The inside's scarier, if that helps.” He shoulders open the door and vaguely indicates the doorway. “Careful when you head in; it makes you dizzy at first.”

It's interesting, the way she eyes him, distrustful without seeming even the least bit intimidated. She does go in without hesitation, too, only stopping to hold on to the handrail of the stairs to steady herself when he's followed her inside. “Jesus,” she says, turning to glare at him once her head clears. “ _You_ did all that? Are you on the run or something?”

“Not anymore, technically.” He grins. “Maybe I just think it's funny.”

“Sure, that's believable. Cloaking this place all the way to hell for a joke.” In the crammed upper storey, she stands in the middle of the room and takes a slow look around. “Right. Now, _this_ I can see.”

It figures that she can: his mum's signature is all over this place, even now. Some books were never touched again after she died; most shelves were never moved. Her system was impenetrable for an outsider and has become second nature to Gerry. There's no improving it without breaking it beyond repair.

( _Why not break it, then_? The question has become something of a private ritual to him. Why not break it, make it irreparably and irreversibly unrecognisable? He's not afraid of change. He wonders, at the same time, if he's not afraid enough of things remaining as they are.)

“So, what do you know about the history of the place?” Melanie, after her brief round of inspection, has taken to kneeling on the floor and unpacking an impressive and somehow equally ridiculous amount of equipment. “I really couldn't find much on the building. It's not even that old – what, 1920s?”

“1911,” says Gerry. He sits across from her, and Christ, he really doesn't have the place set up for guests, does he; there aren't even chairs. “Didn't have to tear down anything to build it, either. It was meant to be workers' accommodation.”

“Right. Well, if you know anything, even vague, about past deaths in here, or any instances of violence aside from murder –”

“Can I ask you something?”

Melanie frowns. “Sure.”

He can't pin down how she does it, but every word out of her mouth sounds like a challenge. “What do you... do? What's your day job? I've never met a regulating necromancer who wasn't with the police.”

She rolls her eyes. “Don't call it regulating. That's just prettying it up so it sounds a little less brutal.”

“What do you call it?”

“I kill things.” There's a small pinch above the bridge of her nose, like her eyebrows don't quite want to make an effort. “Things that shouldn't be alive. Regulators or whatever they call themselves just because they have the government's blessing aren't half as good at that as they think they are, which you _know_ , or you wouldn't have asked me.”

While irrelevant to Gerry, who simply doesn't want cops in his house, it's still not a bad guess. Another thing his mother had been right about: the purposeful uselessness of magic within state apparatuses knows no bounds. “Fair to say you're a ghost hunter, then?”

“Better that than more overblown, self-important garbage.” Even with nowhere specific to direct it to, she looks angry. “It's the same with psychics, too. _They_ think they're too good for the simpler word; fine, then, I'm using it anyway.”

Oh, but he likes her. “Met a lot of them?”

“Enough to form an opinion. Are you one?”

“Marginally. What about all this?” He nods towards the neatly arranged video equipment on the floor. “Standard documentation purposes?”

“For now, yes.” It's a sudden change, and almost brief enough to miss, but for the first time, she seems less sure of herself. “If we do get any footage, it'll be useful for me, but – I'd check back with you, too, maybe ask for your permission to publish. We don't have to talk about that now.”

It's odd, the way in which she isn't at all what he expected. He can certainly see how she and Jon would clash – there couldn't possibly be two senses of self-preservation more diametrically opposed – but what brought them together in the first place? The Institute can't have been it; surely an anarchist streak a mile wide would have prevented her from seeking the place out. Spurred on by curiosity, he smiles. “All right, ghost hunter. Sounds promising.”

Her eyes on him are wary, seeking to trace derision in his tone, which, again, fair – he's not great at sounding earnest. “Any answer, then? To what I asked when you interrupted me earlier?”

 _Ah_. “Violent deaths, right? Shouldn't have to look far; it's my mother. She killed herself in here. During a necromancy ritual, too. Round about...” He points past where Melanie is sitting. “There, by the window.”

Melanie stares, first at him, then at the spot he indicated. “Right,” she says finally, not without a measure of exasperation. “Guess I won't be able to exploit that one for fun _or_ profit.”

Jon, not that Gerry particularly expected him to be overly generous with praise, didn't exaggerate. Melanie knows what she's doing. She nods calmly along as Gerry describes, as non-graphically as possible, the circumstances of his mother's death, and she's single-minded and detached as she lays out supplies, finding, it seems, about as much joy in it as the average person would in a standard office job. Gerry's gathered together all he thought she might need in advance, but having stayed well away from necromancy himself, he watches her with some curiosity.

“Why the wine?”

“Just insurance,” says Melanie shortly. She's going through one of his mother's notebooks, the one she last kept which is, according to Melanie, their best bet on conjuring any sort of manifestation that'll be more communicative than the cold spells and grey shadows Gerry has become so used to. “The Romans did it, sort of as a method of placation. Blood's the alternative, and I figured you'd want that potentially spilling on your carpet even less.”

She's not wrong: the carpet is the newest thing in here. There is a limit even to the macabre Gerry can endure in his daily life, and so he had the old one ripped out after he moved back into the shop. “Would blood help? With this being a family thing and all?”

“No,” she says sharply. “You want her to manifest; you don't want her _strong_. That's what most people get wrong. You can't feed an undead thing and expect for that not to whet its appetite.”

Oh, clever. He watches her move items around, arranging them in this or that sequence until she's satisfied, and then begin to scrawl runes in black ink across a plain chalkboard. When she's done, he raises an eyebrow at her. “And now?”

“Now we wait,” she says, and crosses her legs as she pulls out her phone. “See if she blinks first.”

It's not a long wait – Jon asked him when he was here, hesitant, how often his mother graced him with what almost resembled an appearance in a day. Not quite hourly, Gerry said, and watched Jon's face go from horrified to questioning to, and this was worst, understanding.

It doesn't shake Gerry anymore, really. It stopped doing that gradually, until he could barely remember having ever felt frightened by it. Jon's response seemed strange to him. Foreign, almost. Should it still be horrible? Should it be that now that he sees it in Melanie, who sets her jaw in angry and terrified determination when that familiar dark groan swells in the suddenly-cold room like a creeping, haunting chorus?

Melanie, afraid or not, makes quick work of it. She keeps her eyes on Gerry's, both of them listening and feeling as the shapeless, ashen terror in the room grows slowly into a shadowy form. It always goes this far, and then – just as the spot of greyscale almost becomes a shape, as the groan almost becomes a word – Gerry nods at Melanie, his lips forming a silent “Now”.

Instantly, she presses the notebook face-down onto the chalk runes, and whispers an invocation too quiet and quick for him to catch.

The groan becomes a shriek.

It catches them both off guard, Melanie's hands darting from the notebook she was holding up to cover her ears, and Gerry flinching hard enough to ram his elbow straight into the bookshelf behind him. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says at the same time as Melanie jumps up from where she was sitting and grabs him by the shoulders, pulling him forward with more strength than he thought she could hold in those thin arms, but he goes easily, listing towards her just as, out of the corner of his eye, he sees an ash-grey shape throw itself violently towards the bookshelf he'd only just been leaning against. Melanie's hands are on his shoulders still, and she's shaking her head, and she's saying something, but the noise behind him drowns it out – or does it? Can she hear it, still? Her hands are at the sides of his face, now, but he's stronger than her and he turns anyway, turns to face the bookshelf and the thing before it –

The thing before him is not a thing. _Things that aren't supposed to be alive_ , Melanie said earlier, but this is not alive; it can't be. For a brief, mad moment, Gerry thinks he's staring himself in the face; then, there isn't a face at all, only a grey swirl that attempts with what feels like desperation to stay in the shape of a human being. Where a face should be, it has nothing – nothing, except a darkening spot in the middle that distorts into what might be a mouth which screams, the flicker of teeth, and then a hand, shot forth from somewhere inside this swirling mess. The shrill sound that hasn't once stopped morphs, shudders, into a high-pitched staccato that makes Gerry's head spin.

He stumbles to the side, just lucid enough to understand that the hand wasn't reaching out for _him_ at all, and that's just like her, isn't it; she senses an intruder and she uses whatever pitiful bit of strength was just pumped into her to do whatever harm she can. Melanie must have come to stand next to him, hands continuously gripping at his shoulders to shake some sense into him, and with his single step to the side, he's dislodged her just enough for her to stumble out of the hand's reach.

The next thing he knows is pure cold, quick and instant, as if his veins are shot through with ice. The pain of it comes immediately after, the pins and needles and white heat that he's familiar with from past run-ins with frostbite. He bites his lip hard, keeping in a scream of pain, and allows himself, in spite of any and all better instincts, to feel it fully.

Something about it works. It's agonizing, the hot and cold burn of it, but before him, the spectre is beginning to lose shape. Its hand, which must have cut through him like butter, has vanished, and even its anguished groans begin to ebb. He can hear Melanie again, but can't make out what she's saying to him – no, she's not talking to him at all. She's spitting out an incantation, furious and braver than him, and then she sees her rush forward, wielding something dark – iron? – that slices smoothly through the remaining grey mass.

Another shrill sound, and the thing dissipates into smoke before them. Melanie turns her head, slowly, to Gerry. _Great fucking work, Delano_ , he thinks, and exhales.

They go to a pub. He half-expected Melanie to curse him to hell and take the next train back to central, but she packs up her equipment instead, more annoyed than angry as she does it, and mutters about theories and options. She does not, it seems, blame him at all: what she's frustrated with is feeling like she's failed.

He can relate.

“It just doesn't track,” she says, balancing her coaster on the rim of her pint. “It's not supposed to be able to hurt you like that, or anyone. It's not _old_. It hasn't even had time to become that strong. When did you say she died?”

“Four years ago and a bit.” It'll be five, next March. Christ, he's getting old. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry.”

She raises her eyebrows. “For being haunted? Right. You know, you'd get more out of getting angry instead.”

Gerry grins. “Is that what you do?”

A shrug. “Maybe. And?”

“No, you're right. I'll start keeping a poker around, too; that should do it.”

“Fine, be that way. I'm not making an effort to save you next time.”

“I know it's probably the least weird thing about all this,” he says, not sure why he even tells her. Maybe he's lonelier than he thought. “But it didn't – feel like I thought it would, when she touched me.”

Her interest is milder than expected, but then, she must have had her share of ghostly encounters. None of his confusion will be news to her. “What did you expect?”

“You know how it's always said that you actually... feel the undead when they touch you? As in, it's not their touch that hurts you, but their presence _in_ you, the clash between what's left of their essence and the glare of yours? I thought she'd feel angry. Not... furious, she was never like that, but... sort of appalled, I guess. Vicious. I've done my best to piss her off these past few years; I thought this'd be her chance to get back at me. But that pain, it didn't really feel like anger.”

“Huh.” Melanie frowns. “What did it feel like?”

“Fear.” That's what the cold was. It took him a while to understand it, it took the walk to the pub and the stretch in which they waited for their shared serving of chips for him to realise that that's why the cold lingers, now, still; it's not a physical thing at all. “It felt like she was terrified.”

Melanie is chewing on her bottom lip. It's pierced, like his, only on the left side where his is on the right. “Did it feel like her?”

The question catches him off guard. He frowns, slightly annoyed for not having thought of it himself. “I don't know. I... I'm not sure it felt like anyone.”

“Oh, and I meant to ask earlier.” She glances around briefly, but it's still early in the day, and none of the booths around them are taken. “Had this thought right after that thing disappeared. You said the police didn't believe your mother's injuries could have been self-inflicted; that what she was doing didn't seem humanly possible. Do you think she fell?”

Ridiculous, how that question still causes a lurch in his stomach after so much time. Ridiculous and really quite pathetic. She says it casually, too, without the capital F people usually imply in the term. “I think so.” He smiles wryly. “The police didn't. Every character witness they got was just so eager to reaffirm what a calm, composed person she was, how controlled she was in her magic use. _Remarkably contained thaumaturgy_ , they called it. They had no idea. They didn't know her like I did, and they didn't see her then. She was gone. Had it coming, too; I'd been watching her head down that road for years. She never knew when to stop.”

The furrow in Melanie's brow eases, briefly, and makes room for an expression of pure morbid curiosity. “What was that like? How did she – seem, then?”

By rights, it should be a horrible thing to ask, but he can't find it in himself to be hurt. Before it happened to him, he might have paid good money to see what a fallen magic user looked like. “Awful,” he said. “And... enviable, probably. To some.”

It's either good enough for her, or she isn't quite insensitive enough to press. As she hums her assent and picks up another chip, mind probably spinning up new theories again, he thinks that today, spectral encounters and discouragement notwithstanding, perhaps wasn't a complete waste of time.

(He stands in the shop that night, having come home much later than he meant to, and listens to the familiar groaning and creaking of the house. It's not an old building, but it's not a young one, either, and he grew up with these noises, has come to think of them as comforting. He stands in the dark, the front door behind him letting in some of the orange light from the street. “What do you want from me, hm?” The cold is still there, even now, half a day later. It sits in his bones, undisturbed by an afternoon of new company. “Would do us both a world of good if you could just _tell me_.” The shop, save for its same old settling noises, remains quiet, and Gerry goes straight up for some music and what will not turn out to be particularly restful sleep. If his mother shows again that night, he doesn't hear her, and he only remembers right before he passes out that he neglected to learn even the smallest bit about Jon.)

* * *

When his phone rings, Jon is in the process of hitting a dead end. It feels like all he does these days. The Institute is dark, and his steps echo as he makes his way down the staircase. Elias's reading in the past few months of his life was a mess of old theory and discarded hypotheses, utter nonsense from the early 20th century; theories of centrality and surveillance. Jon's missed something, he must have, down in the Archives or the library –

In the dimly-lit corridors of the Institute, his phone sounds twice as loud. (Also, was that what his ringtone always sounded like? How long has it been since someone called him?) The display startles him, too, less because of its brightness and more because...

He scrambles to answer, his right hand still clumsy. “Sasha?”

“Hi, Jon.”

Her tone is so neutral, neither stern nor concerned, and still, hearing her voice cuts him to the quick. “Sasha, are – how are you?”

“Fine.” It's clipped, now, which makes just a little bit more sense. Around his phone, Jon's palm aches. “We need to talk about Martin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for being kind about this story. I hope you're safe & well and I hope you like Martin. It turns out that writing him feels like a warm drink at the end of a rough day while writing Jon & Gerry feels like trying to put on wet jeans. How very on brand for the boys.  
> I'm [here](https://lesamis.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, come say hi! :')


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for illusions, unreality, & burns inflicted in self-defense in this one.

In secret, Sasha half-expected for some kind of dark veil to lift off the Institute if Elias ever died. Not that she was counting on him to be murdered. More the opposite: people like Elias tend have the outrageously survivalist qualities of the average cockroach, untouchable and grossly resilient when smacked with something heavy. Easier to leave when asked, then, and to look on from a job that, while still thankless, at least affords her the glee of knowing she got out while she could.

She doesn't feel gleeful, now, on the stone steps before the entrance. For a moment, she thinks of heading inside, of leaving behind her disguise and just dropping in to say hello to Rosie. Does she still work there? Does anyone, aside from Jon and the Lukases? Were replacements for them ever even hired? Sasha knows exactly why she didn't ask, but it was a difficult question to swallow down. So was everything else. The less she knows, the better, which is both objectively true and the absolute worst maxim for someone like her to try to live by.

It felt wrong, leaving the Institute. By the time Jon asked, she was frustrated enough to do it without having to give it much thought, but it wasn't _right_. Nothing was. The Institute is a fortified edifice of unanswered questions, and Sasha hates nothing more than turning her back on a question that needs answering.

She glances around. There's little in the way of foot-traffic here, at least on a dreary Tuesday morning, and she looks, for all who don't know better, like any other lost tourist. (It's still hard not to feel watched around the Institute. The feeling would be hard to shake, she thinks, even if someone showed her Elias's cold body.) She slips into the alley to the left of the building – badly gated, always has been – where the bins are stored, and steps gingerly around them until she's made her way to the very back, where the small runes she drew on the wall months ago still haven't faded.

Sasha smiles. Reluctant as she was to put them in place at first, they were still some of her best work, and seem to have done their job spectacularly well. If nothing else, this part is something to be proud of. She's quick about wiping them off, whispering quiet words that will undo the illusion in due course. _A shame, almost_ , thinks a part of her that she doesn't always manage to ignore, and magic unravels beneath her hands, knots and strings of illusory wards falling apart, leaving the Institute as it was before.

Just as she slides the gate's padlock into place again, the familiar creak of the Institute's front doors makes her flinch away, pressing her back flush against the wall. Needlessly, perhaps; others rarely see through her disguises, but the Institute is – well, the Institute. You never know what people can and cannot see, especially...

She exhales. It's Jon, making his way down the stairs just a little too quickly, and she winces in sympathy. The pain isn't constant, he told her once when she asked, not long after he finished pain therapy, but it's never gone, either. He barely seems to remember that now. Sasha does not move a muscle. Even from a distance, Jon looks bad, hunched shoulders and small frame, cigarette smoke billowing behind him as he turns the corner and disappears between buildings. It is a near thing: she almost follows him.

Almost. She did what she promised Tim in calling Jon, and she did what she promised Jon in lifting the illusory barriers around the Institute, and she will _not_ do anything more. The Institute's taken enough from her. Even without Elias, it does not deserve her curiosity.

(Tim used to jokingly call her the greatest illusionist of their age. Funny, then, how she can never quite manage to fool herself.)

* * *

Gerry is waiting on the overpass outside New Cross Gate when Jon gets there, leaning against a barrier and watching the trains come in. It strikes Jon through the haze of his own discomfort how at home Gerry looks, how well he fits in – and sure, not everyone is as perpetually uneasy in their own skin as Jon is, but Gerry seems remarkably difficult to unsettle. His utter disaffection at the spectre in his home hasn't let Jon go. There's a danger in that, in being able to get perfectly used to something so cold and painful.

He grins when he sees Jon, turning to rest his back against the bridge. “Could've brought a coffee, you know.”

“Oh.” Jon frowns at himself. “Sorry, I –”

“Joking, Jon. I mean, you could've, but I'll live. Bit late for caffeine, anyway.”

“Thank you for coming.” Jon digs his hands into the pockets of his coat, drawing in his shoulders. The chill is coming on earlier than usual this year. “I – understand it's a lot to ask.”

“Mh, my resentment's building as we speak.” Gerry pushes himself away from the wall and indicates vaguely for Jon to lead the way. “Any progress on your murder investigation, then?”

Jon winces, glancing about them. It's ridiculous to fancy himself watched or listened to by anyone here, but at the same time, the past few weeks have been anything but reassuring. If his bad luck managed to find Martin, _again_ , it might as well be nipping at his heels at this very moment. “I'm not sure if there was ever much progress to make, really. My sight is useless until I know where he died, and I can't exactly try to learn more while that apparently puts me at immediate risk of getting other people cursed. Lord knows how that happened, anyway. I...” He shakes his head. Truth to be told, he could really use a coffee himself. He says, “I need to prioritise this situation,” just as Gerry says, horribly nonchalant, “What about the body?”

Jon stares at him. Gerry shrugs. “The Lukases aren't morbid enough to let him rot in the Institute if he died there; it'd be in bad taste. He's got to be somewhere, a morgue, a private hospital maybe –”

Jon's throat feels, suddenly, tight. “And how would finding his body help me?”

“I'm sure you can figure it out.”

There it is. He clenches his jaw. “You scry from things. Places. Not _people_.”

“Who taught you that? Not Elias, I'll bet.”

 _Balliol_. He doesn't even need to say it. Gerry grins, a little too knowing for Jon's taste. “Taking the high road is only going to get you so far on this one. If it helps, Elias certainly didn't have any qualms making allowances.”

“I'm aware,” says Jon. “Forgive me if I don't rejoice at the prospect of ending up like him.”

At Gerry's scrutinising look, he remembers something – Gerry has mentioned a few times, like it was irrelevant, that he dabbles in scrying like he dabbles in everything else, but Jon knows better, he hopes, than to underestimate him. “What do they do?”

“Hm?”

“The eyes. I wanted to ask the last time, but it seemed...”

“Invasive?”

“Impolite.” Jon huffs. “I think we might be past the stage where invasions of privacy mark high on the list of offences.”

“Maybe I just think they're a good look.” Gerry cranes his neck, making the eye across his throat shift and stretch with the movement. “Interested, are you?”

“Comes with the profession,” says Jon dryly. “Unfortunately.”

Gerry grins, exaggerated. “ _Well_ , what a shame; looks like we're here.”

They actually are. Jon stops short before the cheerful-looking shop window that barely misses being an eyesore and is probably, to most, still this side of charming. The sight makes him ache. It looks just like the sort of place Martin should work, warm and inviting and safe, and even here, Jon's rotten luck clings to Martin simply by association.

He hasn't quite allowed himself to think this through in advance, and deliberately so. It suddenly seems like a flawed plan at best.

“You want to go in alone?”

Jon flinches. Right. Gerry. “I – I think it might be best? If I could let you know, maybe, when – sorry, really, it's just that I haven't seen him since –”

“Nah, it's all right.” It shouldn't be; Jon's hardly told him anything. Gerry's good at reading between the lines – a little too good, maybe, particularly when there really aren't any lines to speak of. “There's a Costa down the street. Just text me.”

“Right.” Jon does not want to go in. _Still a coward_ , he thinks, _after all of this_. “Thank you, Gerry.”

An odd gesture, a handwave. “Yeah.”

And he's off, dark coat billowing like a cloak behind him.

Jon's heart is in his throat. He opens the door before he can let himself run away again.

A bell jingles. The scent of tea is shocking, strong, and – and really very nice. Jon looks around, at the carefully stocked shelves and the little bar counter for drinks to go and the potted plants and the macramé and the patchwork rugs and feels a little bit ill.

There's no one behind the counter, but Martin's voice comes, with that slight hint of irritation Jon has learned to love very well, from behind the beaded curtain that separates the back of the store: “With you in a bit; sorry, actually we've just closed –”

Martin parts the curtain, ducking a little as wooden beads brush against his curls; God, he always was too tall for historic architecture like this, and he's wearing a maroon sweater and an expression of unbridled shock, and Jon is lost.

“Oh.” Martin is holding a file and a pen. Sheets of paper slip quietly to the floor. Jon can't say what instinct it is that makes him move forward, _him_ , the person whose good hand is holding a cane and whose bad hand feels thoroughly useless still, but Martin stops him, setting the file on the counter before he crouches to pick up the papers.

They're closer when Martin stands again, just the counter between them. Jon tries to catch Martin's eyes, but they evade him, darting anxiously about the shop.

“Tim call you?”

“Sasha,” says Jon. There's a crack in his voice. He tells himself again, firmly, to get it the fuck together. “I – I'm sorry for coming to the shop; I think they assumed you'd want me to show up at your home even less than here.”

“Why would that matter?” He says it evenly, quietly. Jon has stopped trying to look at him. “I wasn't the one running away, Jon. Even if you were the only one of us to stay in place.”

“I know.” Martin looks so... like himself. It startles Jon again every time he moves and Jon remembers another of those small habits of his, the way he bites the side of his mouth when he's nervous, the way his hands keep busy. “Sasha told me what happened to you. I'm – really quite sure it's my fault.”

Martin laughs. Jon's not heard that from him before, that dry, angry huff of bitter amusement. “Right. _Right_. Certainly worth jeopardizing that friendship again when I defended you to Tim, then.” He shakes his head. “That's why you're here, hm? Trying to fix whatever's wrong with me? Without giving any straight answers along the way, I assume?”

“I –” Jon stops. He looks at Martin, _really_ looks, and past the initial shock of seeing him again – the wistfulness of it, too, the veil of how much he's missed him obscuring his vision – Jon can tell he's not the same. He's tenser. There are shadows under his eyes that were never there before: Martin's always slept well, for all his anxiety. “Actually, I thought I'd explain everything from the beginning.” He winces, taking stark note of the lofty tone that always comes through when a conversation frightens him, and says, “If you'd like to hear it, of course. We can just talk about the current –” _Don't say curse_ – “situation, otherwise, and work on a solution. If, if you'd prefer to have it over with.”

For a moment, Jon feels sure he's about to be thrown out. It'd be unlike Martin, but certainly not undeserved, and he's braced for it.

Martin exhales. His shoulders drop, drawing his body down as if to make him smaller, and Jon reaches out a hand on instinct. With a soft noise, Martin takes a step back.

“We can talk in the back,” he says quietly, indicating the curtain with a nod of his head. “I'll make tea.”

* * *

It's a cup of September Mist for Jon, Ceylon with lavender and bergamot oil, brewed strong with no milk. Martin is very aware of how pathetic it is that he's almost grateful to get the man to drink something: he scared Martin, earlier, with how broken he looked walking in, and worse, how used to it, as if nothing about him was out of place at all.

He's gotten thinner. He flinches every time he uses his right hand. His hair's still beautiful, almost defiantly so, but Jon doesn't wear it up anymore, and spilling across his shoulders like this, it seems to dwarf his haggard face. Looking at him is painful.

Martin is angry, too. He holds on to that on purpose.

“Strange,” says Jon with a small, unhappy smile into his tea. “Feels like the only times I've sat down with anyone lately were to answer a catalogue of questions.”

“I mean, I didn't actually ask.” He's not sure why he says it. To punctuate the anger, maybe. To feel less like a doormat. “Wasn't really given the chance to, anyway.”

“Sorry. I – I know. Maybe – I should probably start with Sasha.” Jon's rested his cane against the back of the chair, and his unharmed fingers are drumming against the mug. He's rarely this physically nervous. Christ, he must have hated coming here. “I think Tim called her because he didn't want to talk to me, but he might also have guessed that she was... involved?”

“Involved.” So there was something.

Of course there was. There always is. There's no triumph at all in being proved right.

“You will have noticed,” says Jon, more grimly. “After Sasha quit the Institute, when – you were leaving –”

“ _Oh_ , you mean when you broke up with me to push me out.”

“Yes.” Jon lets it fall between them, undisturbed, irrefutable. He takes a breath. “I asked Sasha to set up wards, once all three of you had left. Once I'd – made you leave. I didn't think Tim was exactly going to come back around, but – ”

“You do realise that you've just – skipped the part where you admit to having lied?” Martin can't quite say why it matters so much, only... maybe he can. It _has_ to matter. Jon had been hurtful before then, he'd been inconsiderate and arrogant and aloof, but his unkindness was never a means to an end, never purposeful. “Jon, do you remember any of what you said the last time we were even in the same room? Are you really going to just – just assume we're on the same page after that, that it's obvious that it was all an act and we can move on from here and start over because I've, I've been classified as a magical biohazard or something? Because there's _more important things at hand_? Seriously?”

Jon's jaw moves, but he says nothing. He looks wretched, and it takes Martin a moment to realise that this is what Jon looks like when he doesn't quite trust his own voice.

They sit in silence. Martin sighs quietly, but it's to himself, and he desperately wishes he could turn off the part of him that's aching to reach out. There's more than one reason it's a horrible, stupid instinct he should already have killed stone dead. Jon's fingers are closed around the mug, and he lifts it to his lips, steam fogging up his glasses.

“Sasha called me,” he says finally, mug still held close. “I thought it might matter that you knew why, first. I – Martin, you deserve to know all of this, and I don't know how to _meaningfully_ apologise for any of it, but you deserve to know this most: Sasha warded the Institute so none of you would find what you were looking for, if you did come looking. She – she said it was a good bit of work, keeping you out. She hated doing it. When she heard from Tim that you'd been hurt, she told me she wasn't going to keep up the illusion, and I couldn't possibly ask her to, either. It was meant to keep you safe, and it didn't make any difference at all.”

Jon says those final words like they cut the roof of his mouth.

Somewhere, distantly, Martin takes note of the fact that his hands are clenched beneath the desk.

He hated himself for trying, those few months back, when he was still carrying on with his own investigation. He cursed himself over again for every single dead end he ran into, telling himself over and over to let it go already, that Jon made his choice, that it had nothing to do with magical conspiracies, and everything to do with them, with _him_ , because of course it did, because Jon didn't like him much to begin with, and tricking someone into tolerating you for a while isn't much harder than tricking someone into hiring you.

They were twin poisons, really. In retrospect, Martin wanted neither option to be true.

“So... Sasha knew,” he says, surprising himself. “You told Sasha what you were doing. She knew.”

“No.” The note of desperation in Jon's voice, quiet earlier, is more pronounced now. “She knew I wanted you all to stay away from the Institute so you'd be safe, but it was vague – she didn't know what from, and for her, the facts were exactly the same. I _did_ steal a scholarship from under her nose. I did break up with you; I scried at that bloody circus to give Tim his closure. It – it hardly makes anything better, but I didn't let her in on what I was doing, and she didn't ask. I think it... She was hurt enough to not really care about my motives, in the end.”

“Just as planned, then.” Martin knows his smile is an ugly thing, bitter and wry, but it's directed at the desk between them. “Just the right amount of hurt, yeah?”

Jon's not going to respond, Martin knows as he says it. That's another slap in the face: Jon is careful with words, when it matters. He hates hedging, he hates frivolities and platitudes, and as such, his apologies are few and far between to begin with: not because he doesn't feel sorry, but because he doesn't think an apology is enough. Because he'd prefer to make it right in a way that will matter more.

The knowledge sits unmoving in the silence between them: There is not always such a way.

Jon isn't here to look for one.

“What was it, then?” Martin looks up, and finds that Jon, like an animal trying to be overlooked, has not moved a muscle. “The thing that was so terrible you thought making every single one of us hate you was the best available option?”

Jon's lips move silently a few times before he says, with a frown, “Elias murdered Gertrude Robinson.”

Oh.

Perhaps that should be more surprising. It might be the dullness that's been settling like dust over most emotions these past few months, but Martin can't quite find it in him to be shocked. Elias was always bad news, him being a murderer is – well, it's little more than a single missing puzzle piece. The full picture was already there.

“How did you find out?”

The furrow on Jon's brow deepens. He's looking at his tea, fingers still clutching the mug. “I – after Prentiss. You remember my anxiety, I assume,” he says dryly, ignoring Martin's raised eyebrows.

His anxiety, such as it was, is a little harder to forget than the attack itself. Sure, Martin is going to have nightmares about a fallen necromancer leaving a trail of living decay throughout the Institute for as long as he'll live, probably, but Jon afterwards was somehow more frightening. They'd not been together long by then, and Jon's quietness and pain felt like a regression to how they were before.

They managed, though. They pushed through that; Martin always thought they did. He used to be proud of it, too, about the inches of progress and building trust. How much of that had simply been Jon getting better at hiding his own fear?

“Do you remember what she said? When we were – when she had us trapped, down in the Archives, and she kept going on –”

“She was totally incoherent.” Martin does remember. Not all of her words, but the feeling of Jon's arm around his shoulders, the weight of him when Martin decided it was easier to carry than to support Jon after Prentiss had gotten hold of his leg for a second too long. “I know it sounded horrible, but she wasn't exactly – prophesying anything, Jon.”

“There was this one thing she'd said that wouldn't let me go,” Jon insists. “It felt like – I know it sounded like she wasn't making sense, like she was rambling, but in that moment, she factually knew _more_ than we did. That's what happens when magic users fall; they become instruments of their own power, like – vessels, really. She wasn't herself anymore, maybe, but she was more attuned to every last spot of necrotic energy in the Institute than anyone has ever been before. Do you remember what she called it?”

Martin remembers the sweaty feeling of Jon's hand in his. He remembers wondering if they'd die there, like that, clutching each other in silence. “'The crimson rot beneath your feet',” he says. “I remember.”

Jon gives him a look, and Martin tries hard not to feel offended at the mild surprise in his eyes.

“I still think it was drivel, to be fair. London's built on corpses, of course there's – you know, dead stuff wherever you walk. It's not like the Institute's an exception.”

“No, it really isn't,” Jon agrees quietly. “Only – the way she said it, like we were ignorant of it, that – it just wouldn't let me go. As if there was something about death at the Institute that we were missing, like she was mocking us for it. So I started looking.”

Martin remembers how Jon was, then. Quiet and withdrawn, going through the motions of pain therapy without giving it the attention it deserved – but still Jon, at the end of the day, Jon who cooked for him on good days and silently held his hand on bad ones as they were falling asleep to some documentary or other on Martin's couch. Jon who was so oddly stubborn about inconsequential things it had confounded Martin right up until he realised that Jon _liked_ the bickering, like an absurd type of mating ritual that involved habitual disagreements over the quality of Romantic poetry.

Maybe Martin didn't want to look for warning signs then; maybe there weren't any. He feels exhausted.

“It didn't help not to know what I was even looking for,” Jon goes on. “I mean, you know how I scry, it's not exactly unambiguous –”

“Flip-book logic,” Martin says, having to bite back an unwelcome smile. Jon used to get so intense talking about his own magic, the intricacies and techniques of it, but its limitations above all. He always described his process of scrying from something as flipping through a series of mental snapshots, or emotional ones, that shaped a place or object, their meaning no less obscure than those of a poem or painting. Experience is needed to become good at it, and a mind for hermeneutics. “I know.”

“Right.” Jon looks down at his tea again. “It was so – simple, in the end. Unsophisticated. I still can't say if Elias wanted me to come across it or if he really didn't think I'd ever look. He killed her in her office, no qualms at all. Best I can tell, he – shot her, probably? It was quick.” There's a pallor to him as he says it, and Martin understands Jon's earlier impulses to reach out a little better. “Brutal, still. Lord knows how he covered it up; not that I think anyone looked very hard before I did. The police are meant to have seers, but half of those would have been trained at the Institute to begin with, and I'm not inclined to trust them one way or another, so there... really didn't seem any use to alerting anyone.”

“Really?” Slightly pointed. “No use? To _anyone_ knowing?”

Again, there is no attempt at justification, and no apology. An explanation follows, measured and quiet. “My first thought wasn't even of Gertrude Robinson herself, back then. I think I was already... Maybe it was instinct, or just paranoia, but Elias's delayed reaction to Prentiss, and the way she sounded as if she knew more than us, I just... there weren't that many possible reasons Elias would want to do away with Gertrude; she was hardly high-ranking in questions of Institute management. She had a hand in determining the head researchers, though. She was on the committee for the Lukas foundation scholarships.”

It stops Martin short. Surely not, he thinks, surely even Elias would find a better reason for murder than wanting his reluctant protégé on a scholarship, especially considering how close he always was with the Lukas family to begin with. What ever happened to plain old nepotism? “Oh, come on,” he says, and Jon smiles in that grim way of his.

“In fairness, I don't believe that was all of it. Elias clearly needed me to work on the scholarship project and Gertrude's vote was in the way, but she also – knew things, I think. Elias must have wanted _something_ that made him so hell-bent on getting all the pieces in place, mustn't he, and I – I think Gertrude might have been on to what it was. If she kept records of her research, Elias did a bloody fantastic job disposing of them, because it's been months of looking and I feel like I'm no closer to understanding what his plan was. Only... knowing how easily he was willing to kill for it, and how close we already got to – Sasha almost –” He stops abruptly, his jaw going tight.

“Jon.” Screw this. Martin has to look at him; he has to _actually_ look at him, and if it makes forgiving him inevitable, so bloody be it. “Do you think what happened with Prentiss was your fault? Is that what you've been thinking all year?”

“Something of a tricky term in this case, isn't it?” Jon lowers his eyes, and a lock of hair slips in front of his face only to be thoughtlessly brushed back. “I didn't invite Prentiss in. _I_ didn't drag dirt and death and maggots through the entire Institute. But I – for Christ's sake, Martin, I'm a seer. Maybe the best the Institute had other than Elias, by that point, and he certainly wasn't going to take seriously any concerns that you or Sasha brought up. I should have paid more attention in advance, and I should have taken better care of you all when it happened. So, blame is really... neither here nor there.” He frowns, as if he hasn't quite said what he wanted to. “It makes no difference either way. Trying to do better got me – got _us_ here. Intention and guilt are both useless enough in retrospect.”

It would have sounded bitter, coming from anyone else. Jon always did have a matter-of-fact way of saying horrible things about himself.

“Maybe.” Martin bites the inside of his lip. “That doesn't make everything outside of – actually fixing it useless, you know? It's just an excuse, Jon.”

Jon looks up as if startled. This time, Martin doesn't look away.

“I'm sorry.” He holds Martin's gaze evenly. “I'm sorry, Martin. I thought it might be – insulting, saying it like it made a difference. I wish –” His expression sours, lips a thin line. “I should have told you, then. Tim and Sasha, as well, although I think they would have left sooner rather than later of their own volition. I took away that choice. There's no excuse for that, and there's no excuse for the way I did it.”

Martin allowed himself to imagine this, once or twice these past few months. It always felt gratifying in his fantasies, a little like having won. He really should have known better. “If nothing had happened, after,” says Martin. “If I hadn't gotten – well, whatever this is, you can explain later, I don't care. Would you still have told me, in the end? If we'd just gone our separate ways, and if I'd been –” He trips over the word, almost. There's so little sense to it now. “If we'd been safe? Would you ever have told me the truth?”

Distantly, Martin thinks that it's just bloody like him to ask. Can't leave well enough alone; he'll prod until it's worse again. Only – there's no point to being ignorant on purpose again, is there? Perhaps he didn't ask enough terrible questions the first time around.

They both know the answer. It's obvious in Jon's eyes, too, in that pitying, miserable expression before he even opens his mouth.

“I don't know.”

Martin sighs. “Right.”

“It's not that –“ Jon lifts his hand, briefly, as if to reach over the desk, then draws it across his face instead. “If I had the choice again, if I got to do it all over, of course I wouldn't make the same mistake, but if it had already happened? If the only difference were that you were actually safe, then – then at least – you'd be better off that way, surely, and by what right would I worm my way back into your life after that just to –”

“Safe doesn't equal better off, Jon! I didn't want to be _safe_ , I wanted –” The loudness in his own voice startles him, and Martin takes a breath, coming back to himself. The thought is out before he can stop it. “I was in love with you. Did you ever even believe that?”

For a brief, awful moment, Jon looks stunned. Surprised, like the fact of this didn't occur to him. He opens his mouth, and the moment ends, ripped away by a crashing sound and the suddenly-shrill ringing of the bell hanging by the shop door – the door Martin locked earlier.

Martin is up faster than Jon, and in the front room before Jon can get a half-decent warning out.

The intruder, as Martin learns when he sees him swiftly crossing the front room towards the counter as if he belongs there, is a goth. He nods curtly when he sees him.

“Martin, is it? Jon in the back?”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“We,” the man who broke into the shop says, gesturing towards the door as Jon emerges from behind the beaded curtain, “need to get out of here. Sorry to cut things short.”

Jon's eyes narrow. “What happened?”

“Oh, we _know_ him, do we?” Martin's voice has slipped a full register higher.

“I'm Gerard. Some illusionist out there is headed this way for one of your heads. Any idea which one?”

“What? I sell _tea_! You –” It clicks. A little late, but in fairness, it's been a good while since Martin has sorted through testimonials at the Institute. “Wait, Gerard Keay?”

“Delano, if we're making an effort,” mutters Gerry at the same time as Jon says, urgently, “Gerry. An _assassin_?”

“Hm, caught sight of them on their way over.” Gerard ( _Gerry_ , Martin's mind supplies with some amount of resentment he doesn't care to examine) opens the front door, making a vague gesture meant to usher them both out. “In so far as you can call a hunch 'sight', anyway. If we're lucky, I got here early enough to – ”

He stops as he shuts the shop's door behind them. Jon has gone out first, not hesitating for a moment to listen to Gerard, and now halts on the pavement, holding out an arm before Martin who followed without thinking.

“Don't move,” he says softly. Behind Martin, Gerard sighs.

As much as he can without moving his head, Martin looks around. New Cross Road seems the same, busy and colourful in the blue light of dusk; a bus stop is busy a bit down the road and a steady stream of pedestrians moves around them.

Only – there's a hum beneath it, more unsettling the longer Martin looks. Was the old phone booth always so close to the edge of the street, the young tree by the shop window always a poplar? Unfamiliarity creeps in like a headache, and Martin closes his eyes.

He's read witness accounts of this at the Institute, few as there were. Their meddling being near impossible to prove, illusionists make for better murderers than any other magic user – if they want someone dead and are extremely good at what they do, the matter is as simple as making their victim walk into traffic by accident. It takes less than five seconds of keeping up the effort. The skill and intention needed for that sort of manoeuvre seem to rarely coincide, but Martin suspects that's mostly a matter of those who do have both almost never getting caught.

(Their curses are worse, slow and creeping deadly, and nearly impossible to detect after they've done their damage. Martin wishes he knew less about it. He wishes all of them did, Tim most of all.)

The more attention is paid to an illusion, the less clear any memory of what's real becomes. Martin pictures what he knows: the greengrocers across from the tea shop, the weird costumery next door, the bookshop a few doors down. The coming and going of buses at the stop he watches with one eye all day through the shop window; 436, 171, 453, always in rotation.

“Jon,” says Gerard quietly behind him. “Not the street, the people. Whoever's doing this can't be far. I can take them if you tell me who it is.”

Some illusions, Martin remembers, can be undone in Jon's mind – he's done it before, helping Tim on his search or telling Sasha off for the occasional trick. He's trying now, Martin can hear his effort in the unsteady way he breathes, but if he can see through the fog of wrongness that's enveloped them, then only in single places, not everywhere at once.

All the passers-by around them, just now; Jon couldn't possibly look at each of them.

When Martin opens his eyes, he realises that that isn't what Jon is trying to do: Jon crouches on the ground, a hand pressed firmly to the dirty pavement, and scries.

Nothing around them is right. The street was never this broad, thinks Martin, and it stretches too far into the distance on both sides – it used to bend there, surely, disappearing behind a row of campus accommodation buildings? Nausea rises unevenly, and instead of closing his eyes, Martin looks around to where Gerard is standing.

“Stay still,” he mouths. Before them, Jon lifts his head, and Gerard helps him back to his feet by one arm.

“They're – something's not far from here, some – Martin, what's a larger historic building nearby? Not too old, maybe – Edwardian, but sort of heavy –”

“The Town Hall.” It's practically next door, just close enough for Martin to possibly find his way there blindly. “Past the two shops on the left, if –”

When he looks left of himself, what stretches down the street is a row of shops and the beginning of the campus library, with no town hall in sight. He looks to his right and sees the white tip of the faux-baroque clocktower at the top of Deptford Town Hall out of the corner of his eye, and barely keeps in a groan.

“I have it,” says Jon quietly. “Left of us. I can see it.”

Gerard hums. “How far?”

“Twenty metres, maybe? I'll – I can see; let me go first.”

It's worse than walking in the dark. Twice, Jon's hand swings up in front of Martin, who stumbles back in response only to find the ground shifting beneath him and Jon whispering an apology.

“Everything's moving,” he explains, voice strained. “I keep thinking I'm going forward, and then –”

“Okay, let's – let's take it slow then, yeah?” Martin exchanges a look with Gerard, who _has_ to be affected, but barely looks it. Is it ridiculous to find the tattoo across his throat to look more strained than Gerard himself seems? “One step at a time, Jon.”

Jon's shoulders heave. He moves forward more surely for a few steps, and then he stops, his arm before Martin again as if holding him back from a precipice. “Here,” he says. “Stairs – to the left, if you –”

Gerard blindly sets a foot there, into what looks like empty air, and dizziness sweeps over Martin as a buckled black boot comes down squarely on a marble step that blurs hazily into existence. Gerard smiles darkly. “Any pointers, Jon?”

Jon looks past Gerard, brow furrowing in concentration, then stumbles suddenly forward, a half-formed shout of warning escaping his lips as a jumbled scream.

Gerard is fast. Martin has barely gotten used to the still re-shaping reality around them, but he sees Gerard duck out of the way of – something? Someone? The outlines of a silhouette are there, but it seems to change within half-seconds, like Sasha used to when he'd ask her for celebrity impressions.

A cracking sound, and for a flicker of time, the blur around them disappears as Gerard lands a punch on what now looks like a terrifyingly ordinary middle-aged man. In a split second of lucidity, Martin wonders if they're hidden, here; the pedestrians are hardly going to see this for the self-defense it is, and then he thinks of nothing at all as static bursts from Gerard's hands which are tightly gripping the illusionist's jacket.

The man goes down, beats of electric residue pulsing around him, and Gerard wrenches away his hands with an unhappy frown. “Now,” he says between breaths, “we run.”

“I'm –” Jon is leaning against the now-clear handrail of the steps. Gerard, already halfway down the stairs, turns back around. “If you go, I'll –”

“I can't carry him,” says Martin automatically. At his feet, the illusionist is stirring with a groan. “If we touch, he'll get hurt. Can you –”

“Right. _Fuck_. Sorry.” Gerard looks back and forth between the figure on the ground and Jon, and all three of them wince as they feel reality begin to shift again for seconds at a time. “Jon, are you okay with – ?”

“Can't exactly afford to be delicate about it,” Jon finds the time to say, and is unceremoniously lifted onto Gerard's back, Martin grabbing his abandoned cane as they go.

“Past the recording studios,” says Martin while the street is still the way it's supposed to be – except for them, of course, and Martin's rarely been so grateful at how much it takes for anyone to spare you a second glance in this part of town. “If we can get to the bus stop...”

He drifts off and stops, just as Gerard and Jon do. They should be past the studios by now, by the small road that leads onto the uni campus proper. From where he's standing, it looks as if they've not moved at all.

Martin forces himself to breathe. Christ, but he hates this.

Gerard twists his head to look at Jon, who seems barely conscious. When Martin asked about it, months and months back, Jon admitted that being carried rarely hurt less than walking, it was just faster – and as such, he claimed, more practical.

“Martin,” says Gerard, with another glance behind him, “you know this place. He's only brought the illusion back up a second ago; you know how far we've walked.”

“I'm not –” Martin looks at Jon, his half-closed eyes, his body that seems too small for him. “I worked at the Institute, but I can't –”

“Anyone can. Anyone who walks the same distance every morning can; you _know_ where we are. Your vestibular system knows. You could do this with your eyes closed.”

He probably could. On a normal bloody day, Martin probably could, and today isn't that, and he never gets to choose, does he?

Martin takes a step, then another. At the third, he feels the careful touch of a hand at his back, reassuring him that the others are following without making him turn around. He closes his eyes, imagines the New Cross he knows, and puts one foot in front of the other, until he hears Jon's voice quietly behind him.

“There.”

Martin opens his eyes, and sees Jon vaguely indicating an approaching lorry. They're standing by a bike rack, one that was never near the bus stop. Jon's voice is growing softer, still.

“That's the 171 bus. It stops here. I'll see it, if you can't.”

“Right, can't afford to be picky, we're getting on,” says Gerard and nods for Martin to go ahead.

It's nauseating, the unreality of it. Martin watches the lorry slow down by a red light. He's about to force himself to take the determined step into thin air Gerard took so confidently earlier when the soft press of fingers at his back disappears, and Gerard, behind him, lets out a growl of anger that sounds barely human.

“Oh, no, you fucking _don't_.”

Martin turns just quickly enough to see a stranger – flickering in and out of their own appearance – try to grip at Jon's shoulders, and there's a voice that morphs and shifts like a headache is droning words Martin can never quite catch, as if he's not really listening, no matter how hard he tries.

Curses start this way. The words, first, and then a touch, skin to skin, and they'll have lost.

Jon throws back an elbow, which does an impressive job of momentarily throwing off his assailant. He stumbles back by a foot or so, but his voice still carries, non-words a crackling distortion around them. Martin moves blindly forward, putting himself between the illusionist and Jon who has dropped from Gerard's back, held upright with an arm wrapped around his shoulders.

“The – the bus.” Martin defies the screaming caution of his new instincts to push the two of them along with one helpless arm. “Get on the bus, go, _go_!”

“ _Martin_ –”

Before him, the world and the man moulding it are in constant transition, shifting seamlessly between images, but the movement of the illusionist reaching out for Jon is easy enough to follow.

It happens by reflex. Martin doesn't think. He drops Jon's cane with a clatter and presses his palms to the illusionist's face.

* * *

Under Gerry's transmutation efforts, Martin Blackwood lights up like a Christmas tree. Martin manages not to startle – good thing, too, because Gerry had to be rather inventive to come up with a modification that'd let him use transmutation without touching its target. Jon, at the other end of the desk, winces noticeably.

“There we are,” Gerry says. He keeps his voice low. “That'll be Jude Perry's signature.”

Martin's hand burns in a golden red, the colour dispersing and flashing beneath his skin wherever it is exposed. On the flat surface of the desk, Martin's hand has gone tense and rigid on painted paper.

Next to them, Jon looks ill.

Gerry took a seat couple of rows behind them on the bus earlier, directing his attention elsewhere – around them, by necessity – as they talked in soft, hurried voices. By the time they got to the bookshop, Martin had become quiet, and his expression hard. Gerry can't get a read on him. His intentions seem perfectly neutral, kind, even, but he's too closed off for Gerry to learn anything else. Having his eyes look at Martin feels like staring at someone through a mist.

Magic is never as elusive as emotion. It announces itself to them, bright and alive, and at least this part is nearly unambiguous.

“On the upside, you didn't carry away an _additional_ curse from our new friend,” Gerry says. His own palms are braced on the same paper as Martin's, and it takes a little more effort than usual to seem easygoing. Martin Blackwood's magical household is, for lack of a better term, a bit of a mess. It's exhausting to wade through. “There's something else, though.”

“What?” Jon moves hectically, as if to look closer at Martin might provide some insight. “No, he didn't – what is it?”

Gerry frowns. It's becoming increasingly humiliating, leaving Jon in the same spot over and over. “I don't know.” Abruptly, he lets go of the paper, and Martin exhales as the light beneath his skin vanishes. “I've a theory, though.”

“Oh, great,” says Martin weakly.

“Jon, would you mind if I cast a spell on you? Might feel strange for one of you for a second, but I'll lift it right away.”

Martin frowns. “For one of us?”

“Probably you, actually,” amends Gerry with a vaguely apologetic look at him. “It's a gimmicky one, lets you write in ink using just your fingers. Barely works, nothing painful, just weird.”

He expects a glare – Martin hasn't, so far, made much of an effort to disguise those – but Martin only looks at Jon, and shrugs with a sort of put-upon indifference when he sees him nod.

“Jon, your hand?” Gerry knows the spell by heart. It is old, and flawed, and was messily made-up when he was young as one of his first forays into coming up with his own little magical designs. He relied on ink a lot then, ink and paint to help him streamline magic that otherwise felt like a very wild and untameable thing. His mum used to scoff at his need of it, childish and cautious as it was, but that only made him worry more about having those helpers taken away from him. A summoning spell, then, ink flowing thinly from fingertips, should he ever have need of it. He refills the inkwell it draws from on a regular basis, and tucks it back safely into its same hiding place under his bed even today.

The words end, and he touches Jon's offered hand.

“Try it out.” He pushes the already-marked paper towards Jon.

Jon's uncertain finger traces a quick swirl on the paper. Nothing happens.

Martin reaches over without needing to be asked, and the trail of his index finger leaves a thin, black line.

With a quiet murmur, Gerry lifts the spell. He wasn't wrong, then. In a different situation, that might have been a comfort.

“I don't understand.”

It's Jon who says it, low and helpless. He's looking at Martin, and Martin is looking at his hand.

“Martin's the anchor of a protective spell.” Gerry gathers his pieces of paper, one by one, from the desk, like keeping things in order will somehow contain the bloody mess they've found themselves in. “Cast on you, Jon. Any spell or curse directed at you will affect Martin instead.”

“But that's not –” Jon shakes his head. “Martin, I didn't –”

Quietly, “I know, Jon.”

Gerry's seen a few of them by now, those aborted gestures between the two, the reaching-out of hands that draw back as if thinking better of it. When Jon called him this morning, he referred to Martin as a “friend”, someone who “used to work at the institute”, and both clearly don't begin to cover what they are, or were. It hurts to look at, a little bit, and looking away only does so much when you're in a room with them both.

“Gerry.” Jon's frustration makes him, oddly, look more alive. Gerry hasn't seen anger from him before. “Are you sure about this? How could – I've not done anything; how wouldn't I _know_ if someone had cast something on me? Wouldn't I have needed to _be_ there for it?”

“Maybe you were.”

“That –” Jon stops. “But I've – today, that affected me, too. And the first time you looked for Jude's spell –”

“It doesn't stop magic from being used _on_ you.” The fact of it is infuriating. Gerry knows spells like this, he knows what they require and what they look like in a person; he's undone a few of them, even. This one's just decided to skip adhering to some very elementary rules. “It doesn't even stop magic from harming you generally, or Perry wouldn't have been able to burn you. It – it's more of a lightning conductor; it reroutes the specific intention of spells and curses that's directed at you.”

It's hard to look at, and he shouldn't be here for it, that quiet devastation in Jon. “Who,” he says. His jaw has gone tight. “Someone did it. Someone did, so there has to be somewhere I can at least _look_ –”

“If that's any consolation, I'm really annoyed by it, too.” Gerry worries at his lip ring, and feels a frown come on. “Spells usually have something distinct about them, an identifier, just as curses do. They're meant to. But I could barely find a mark on you.”

When Gerry looks at him, Martin somehow evades his gaze without moving. It's almost violent, the force with which he does not want to be looked at, and his silence is its own abrasion.

Gerry glances at Jon. Then, he gets up from the table, murmurs something or other about seeing about some food, and gives them space.

He lets his eyes roam the facade of the shop as he smokes outside. The illusion is intact, and should still do a fair job of hiding them from anyone who might come looking.

Gerry doesn't think anyone will. A fair number of people might want Jon dead for as yet unknown reasons, but they're clearly not being particularly methodical about it. Today's illusionist, in any case, will be too busy recovering from second degree burns to take another shot.

Martin let him go almost as soon as he'd touched him, nearly as horrified as his attacker at the immediate effect. It was enough to buy them the time they needed to escape, enough, even, for Gerry to badly cast a very desperate cloaking spell over the scene. With a little bit of luck, the odd mix of Gerry's spell and the stranger's illusion was enough to keep them off the radars of potential onlookers – luck, of course, feels like a phenomenally bad thing to rely on.

The door behind him creaks just as Gerry makes up his mind to actually order food, because circumstances have made him a host yet again, and if the universe is so determined to bully him into the role, he might as well make an attempt at being decent at it. He doesn't turn around.

He hears Martin stop in the doorway.

“How did you know?”

Gerry turns, then, and raises his eyebrows. “Sorry?”

“You just – just burst into the shop, rushing us out, but you didn't know who was coming, or when, or – why, even. Just that they were.” Martin shifts his weight. It's something of a strange sight, someone so wary and defiant at once. “It's the eyes, isn't it?”

Hah. And here was Jon, needling him about it just a few hours earlier. “You don't like me very much, do you?”

“I don't know you. We can't all be as desperate to trust a stranger as Jon is,” says Martin evenly. “No offence.”

Gerry hums. He's not allowed himself to examine Jon's trust yet, but it doesn't take a genius to acknowledge that it's not entirely normal for someone so isolated. It's wearing trust's face, maybe, but there's indifference behind it. When Jon came to him for the first time, he expected at least in part to be hurt. He'd offered his burned hand as a simple matter of course.

“They see more than I do,” says Gerry. He holds his hand up before himself, moves his fingers, watches the small eyes shift on his knuckles. “Intentions, inclinations. Vague, blurry things. To be honest, they're useless more often than not. But they stay awake when I sleep, and they come in handy when someone's intention just happens to be as blatant as murder.”

“Right.”

 _Certainly useless when it comes to you_ , thinks Gerry. “Can I ask you a question, too?”

Martin shrugs. Gerry wonders what he came down here for.

“How does it feel? The curse?”

Curses change. They warp, they proceed, they escalate, they eat up their hosts. Right now, perhaps Martin's just feels like a superpower.

But Martin looks at his hands, raised slightly before him in an accidental mirror of Gerry, and in the uncomfortable white glow of the street lamps, his carefully neutral mask slips. It's gone quickly, but Gerry caught it. He's angry.

“Nothing,” he says. “Feels like nothing at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In most senses of the term, this was a Big chapter to write, so apologies (again!) for taking so long. Thank you for reading! I hope you've all made it safely into the new year. 🧡  
> I'm [here](https://lesamis.tumblr.com/) for chats & needling. Up next: Some inquiries into curse-breaking.


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